Grumbles from a British Egyptian woman. I study Politics, Philosophy & History in an attempt to make sense of the World & all the stuff that happens in it.

Monthly Archives: May 2013

“The faintest suggestion that women’s bodies aren’t their toys (such as patiently explaining the differences between a vagina and a laptop, for example), and, hello, out come the little grabby-grabby hands. You can practically see their chocolate-smeared mouths wailing: “Mine! Mine! I don’t want it to be up to her whether I can look at them or touch them! It’s not fair! I should be able to buy access to women, or at least exchange it for Being A Nice Guy!””

This x million.

I don’t understand why we are having the same conversations over & over again about rape and consent. How many more decades of pointing out the same things do we need before attitudes will change.

Have to say, am deeply suspicious of those propagating these ‘defences’ (read victim-blaming). What have the men (&sometimes women) who propogate this rape apologism got to hide? Is it about their own behaviour? Is that what he was thinking about some of the victims of crime while he was on Crimewatch.

In pushing these victim blaming narratives, it’s not so much that Ross is complicit with rapists. By giving rapists excuses and absolving them of responsibilities, he’s acting as an accomplice to them & to rape culture.

Despite several thousand years of masculinism, and perhaps partly because of it, men are still mostly portrayed as weak and helpless when it comes to sexual offenses. Why?

So many portrayals of men in popular culture make out that men are incapable of taking responsibility for where they put their penises, and that not only does this give women the power to ‘give’ or ‘withhold’ sex, but that this imagined power is actually meaningful.

It is plainly objectionable to assume that most men are rapists. Whether you’re a comedian making jokes which imply your audience will empathise with rapists and have a good old chuckle at survivors, or whether you’re warning women not to dress a certain way in case they provoke men to rape them, we have to ask:…

I have written before about why I never reported my rape to the police, and reams about the trail of disgusting fuck-ups the police have displayed in handling of rape. I know that many feel the same way, unable to trust this violent, patriarchal institution to help healing and justice. Yet some do, or at least see going to the police is the best option available. And for some, the police really are helpful. For the rest of us, we look at the police and plot revolution, plot for a day when they are the best option for none as we deal with the entrenched societal problem with rape and let go of models of retributive justice, doing away with this coercive arm of the state.

Getting rid of the police and their role in dealing with the aftermath of…

“To suggest that the Woolwich attack was not driven by political anger is not to deny that we should take the threat of Islamism seriously. But we should also understand what underlies ‘homegrown’ terrorism. There was something bizarre, indeed surreal, about seeing a young black man with a broad south London accent raging about British soldiers in ‘our lands’, and warning that ‘you people will never be safe’. It tells us less about his attachment to Islam than about his complete disengagement from British society. Islamism has become one expression of such disengagement and of such detachment from social norms.”

1

It was a mad, barbarous attack, more akin to a particularly savage form of street violence than to a politically motivated act. What was striking about the incident was not just its depravity but the desire of the murderers for that depravity to be captured on film. This was narcissistic horror, an attempt to create a spectacle, enact a performance, and generate media frenzy. In that it succeeded. We should not provide the act with greater legitimacy by rationalizing it in political or religious terms. Even to call it a terrorist act is to give it too much credibility.

2

Brutal nihilism and narcissistic hatred are central threads of contemporary jihadism. This is as true of 9/11 and 7/7 and the Boston bombing as it is true of the Woolwich murder. But while 9/11 and 7/7 were degenerate acts, the Woolwich attack shows how much more degenerate such…

There is a scandal unfolding quietly in this country which poses an existential threat to our most critical public services. It is called the Private Finance Initiative. Today, we look at the dangerous circle of self-interest which means our government is making the tax payer pay the bill for private service providers and banks to take over our schools, hospitals and other core public services.

What is PFI?

PFI stands for Private Finance Initiative. The schemes were initially designed by Tory Chancellor Norman Lamont in 1992 and were rapidly expanded under New Labour. They are touted as a form of Public Private Partnership. The government uses private finance, rather than borrowing in the usual way, to raise funds for projects. Since 1992, our hospitals and schools have been built this way. PFI loans are at least twice the rate of interest of ordinary government loans, and repaid over 25-30 years.

I often pick up on interesting exchanges from the Commons for this blog. However, this week I came across one which went way beyond ‘interesting’ and well into the territory of ‘he can’t possibly have really just said that’.

I’ve written before about Foodbanks, and the appalling gall of David Cameron in trying to claim the exponential rise in their numbers as an expression of his ‘Big Society’. Cameron has also been incredibly disingenuous when criticised about this rise, claiming that

The use of food banks went up tenfold under the last Labour government.

As Channel 4’s Full Fact has pointed out, the tenfold increase during 6 years under the last Labour government in the number of people receiving help from Foodbanks (by around 36,000 to 40,898) is dwarfed by the increase of 87,799 (to 128,697) that took place in just the first 2 years of the coalition government.